Forest management is a branch of forestry concerned with forest regulation including silviculture, management for aesthetics, fish, recreation, urban values, water, wilderness, wildlife, wood products, forest genetic resources, and other forest resource values. Forest management techniques include timber extraction, planting and replanting of various species, cutting roads and pathways through forests, and preventing fire. Accurate forest inventories are necessary to forest management (such as, to keep costs related to forest-inventory management tasks relatively low).
Forest management (silviculture management) is the practice of controlling, assessing and monitoring the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests to meet diverse needs and values. Silviculture also focuses on making sure that the treatment(s) of forested areas maintains their health, growth and their productivity. To some the distinction, between forestry and silviculture is that silviculture is applied to activities related to harvesting of timber and renewal of harvested areas, and forestry is broader. Complete regimes for renewal, tending, and harvesting forests are called silvicultural tasks and related systems. So, active management may be required for silviculture management, whereas passive management may be used in forestry management without the application of a forest stand-level treatment. Forest management (silviculture management) may be divided into assessing, renewal, tending, and harvesting techniques. Assessment may be further divided into assessing the quality and quantity of timber before harvest, and the growth of trees after renewal. The assessment of the quantity and quality of trees before harvesting may also be called estimating or developing a forest resource inventory, developing a forest vegetation inventory, or similar terms (such as, forest-inventory management). Accurate forest inventory information is critical to the success of the forest industry. (In a similar way, accurate estimates of mineral resources are critical to the mining industry.) Furthermore, the planning of harvesting, renewal and tending activities requires accurate information about the terrain, such as absolute elevation and local terrain slope, which determine drainage of water and operability of silvicultural machinery.